by Legs McNeil
I mean, big mistake. Ralph really complained about it during pretrial preparation.
RICHARD ROSFELDER: When Reuben’s wife, Naomi Delgado, walked into the courtroom at his tax trial wearing some kind of a fur outfit and a short skirt, my comment to the Strike Force attorneys was, “You’d think the defense lawyers would be smarter than to send her in looking like that.”
ROGER YOUNG: Right before trial, Reuben comes over to me and asks, “How’s your dad?”—not knowing that my dad had passed away.
I looked at Reuben and said, “He’s doing great. He’s better off than you and I.”—meaning he’s in heaven. Reuben didn’t get it. He goes back, and the defense attorney leans over and whispers to him, “Roger’s dad just passed away.”
Reuben jumps up, runs right back over, puts his hand on my shoulder, and says, “Geez, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Your father was a fine man. He was honest. He did a good job. I had a lot of respect for him. I’m really sorry to hear that.”
I’m thinking to myself, Yeah, sure. So I said, “Well, that’s okay. Like I said, he’s better off than you or I.”
RICHARD ROSFELDER: I said, “That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve seen going on today, other than Reuben snoring in his chair at the defense table.” That was the depth of my perception.
Later it became apparent that she was dressed that way for a purpose. They were going after a juror—and Naomi ended up hooking up with him.
ROGER YOUNG: I think Reuben’s biggest mistake was turning on his secretary of twenty years, Marjorie Rollins.
We spent a lot of time with her because she was so knowledgeable: She ran all his businesses, and kept the books and all the paperwork. She was a loyal employee. She thought the world of Reuben, and he took care of her pretty well financially—loaned her money when she needed it. Then Reuben got upset at her over something and fired her, after twenty years. That turned her.
Marjorie made us believe the old adage: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
RICHARD ROSFELDER: Reuben had literally hundreds of separate corporate entities. Marjorie Rollins testified that she’d just pull names out of the phone book, or some book she was reading, and, you know, they’d just create a president and a secretary/treasurer and put it down on paper.
Or they’d use people out of Reuben’s Canadian operations, take their names and signatures, and make stamps. So when you were looking for a Roger Carlton or a Steven Baker—you know, if they existed at all, they were working in some warehouse up in Canada.
ROGER YOUNG: Rich Rosfelder said, “I’ll bet you a month’s paycheck you got jury tampering.”
We were convinced something foul went on, and so were the other jurors. They were the ones who said, “Something’s wrong here. There’s no way these women can’t find him not guilty.”
RICHARD ROSFELDER: The amount of money that was being spent was pretty astronomical, and I think the risks were probably minimized through Sturman’s efforts—the way that he defended the business operations.
I remain unimpressed with the suggestion that a lot of people make about Reuben Sturman: “It’s a shame he didn’t get involved in a more legitimate enterprise” or, “It’s a shame that he didn’t just pay his taxes.”
I feel that Reuben—and the rest of the people who operated these businesses along with him—may have fared as well as they did financially because they were involved in an area that might attract the mob to a lucrative business operation. And by a lot of people’s accounts, did attract the mob. They wanted their piece of the action.
ROGER YOUNG: When they came back with a hung jury, Sturman was all excited. He came over, looked at me, and said, “Nice try, kid.”
I said, “It’s not over.”
He says, “What do you mean, it’s not over?”
I said, “We’re going to retry the case.”
Of course the prosecutors said, “Roger’s right. We’re going to retry the case.”
Sturman runs back to his attorneys and says, “Whaddya mean they’re gonna retry? Didn’t we win?”
RICHARD ROSFELDER: People knew that if they were going to go up against Reuben Sturman, he was going to put up a fight. I think he got used to winning those fights because he never lost.
That kind of became the trademark of his operation, you know—that he defended the people he supplied. He provided funds and lawyers…and may have changed the laws in the United States as a result.
ROGER YOUNG: After the hung jury, we were going to start trial again. Well, Sturman decides he’s gonna accept the indictment straight up—he’s going to plead guilty. He’s not going to go to a second trial.
Why now? After fighting twenty years? He said he was tired. I was shocked.
That’s not like him. That’s out of character.
Reuben comes up to me in court after he pleads guilty and just says, “I’m through.”
I asked, “What do you mean?”
He says, “I don’t have anything to live for anymore. I’m just going to give up.”
I think he was just waiting to die in prison.
Cain and Abel
LOS ANGELES/SAN FRANCISCO
1991
TOM BYRON: Jim Mitchell was a cool motherfucker. I worked for him only once, on a movie called Grafenberg Girls Go Fishing. We went out on a boat and had this big orgy in the fucking hull—the girls were being loaded down in a fish basket. And they had a fucking chef cooking fucking lobsters and steaks. It was one of the best fucking shoots I’ve ever been on. And fucking Jim and Artie had all the best fucking pot, man. We’re all stoned—eating and fucking.
It was phenomenal.
MARILYN CHAMBERS: I loved the Mitchell brothers. They were like my brothers. What was the problem? Well, we were all doing coke. I mean, I was doing like ten theater shows a day. Grueling stuff—fist fucking, balls up my butt. I was just, bhfoo!
And, you know, when you’re doing that stuff you don’t eat a whole lot, ha, ha, ha. So I was a skinny little thing, and there was a lot of drugs and a lot of alcohol. It was just a mad scene, just, you know—mind-boggling. Made a lot of money, though. Those were the days.
BANA WITT (ARTIE MITCHELL’S GIRLFRIEND): I was never comfortable around Artie; he was so supercharged that I’d get breathless. As soon as I heard his voice, my heart would start racing; I’d have to pee. Almost a panic response. He was—so exciting, you know?
I was pretty good at pretending to be cool, not saying anything, but inside I didn’t feel cool at all. I was just like, “Whoa, this is so heavy.”
PATRICK COLLINS (PORNOGRAPHER): I loved the O’Farrell Theater. You could do a lot there, man. There were no windows; you could go stick the pussy in your face. It was a good time.
JACK BOULWARE: Jim was much more of the hands-on, day-to-day guy running the O’Farrell. Artie seemed a little aloof to me the few times that I saw him. They always had a bunch of other people around. But it was still a good time. They would invite people up to the theater and shoot pool and have a few Heinekens. But—as it happens with everybody who had a great time in the sixties and seventies—it can’t last forever, you know?
BANA WITT: After I did my first sex scene for the Mitchell brothers, everybody was doing amyl nitrate, and I was lying on my back, and I said, “Hey, give me a hit.”
So this girl spills the whole bottle up into my nose. I was epileptic at the time, and I just freaked. I started rushing. And the burning—it singed the membrane, you know?
MARILYN CHAMBERS: I broke up with Chuck Traynor around 1979 or 1980. And my boyfriend, Bobby—who was also my bodyguard—and I went to the O’Farrell Theater a bunch of times; that’s when we got busted. I went out in the audience and let somebody touch me, and there happened to be a vice squad there. They were planning on arresting me anyway. Fortunately there were no drugs or anything like that, but Bobby did have a gun on him, which wasn’t too good, ha, ha, ha. My arrest was the biggest news of the decade there, you know?
BANA WITT: Tha
t day, it just so happened Jim had asked for a gallon of water on the set. So he grabbed the water, and he started flushing my face with it. I thought, “You better call an ambulance.” I was completely panicked; I thought I was gonna go into a big-time epileptic fit.
They put me in a spare room, and I laid down. After a while Artie came in to see how I was, and we started talking, and then we started fucking.
MARILYN CHAMBERS: The O’Farrell was packed the day after we were arrested. And they put the mayor’s phone number up on the marquee—“Call Mayor Dianne Feinstein.”
The Mitchells just had a great sense of humor. And all these reporters wrote articles, and I’m in jail with my fur coat and nothing else on, and they want to take pictures. I took a mug shot with every cop in the place, and they’re going, “I’m really sorry we had to do this.” And the next night they were all back enjoying the show.
BANA WITT: Sex is so great on amyl, and I had just had a megadose, but I was also potentially injured. Showed what a psycho Artie was, you know?
But we had absolutely fabulous sex. I mean, I was so high, and I was just hooked on Artie after that—for the rest of my life.
JACK BOULWARE: Journalists would come from all over the world, and the Mitchells had this policy of just inviting them in—so they knew they always had the media on their side. For a time, they even employed Hunter S. Thompson. He was working on a book called Night Manager, which never materialized. But there’s a very nice photograph of Hunter in the theater with a cast on his leg.
BANA WITT: Hunter Thompson—that guy scared me so bad. He’s so high-energy and narcissistic; he gives me the runs just being around him. And there was always so much coke around, so I was even more stressed.
ALEX CASTRO (SAN FRANCISCO CAB DRIVER): I was a driver for the Mitchell brothers, and one night I picked up Hunter Thompson at the theater, and it seemed like it was a party night.
He was going to do some sort of reading on Broadway, at a theater there. He was reading a book or something. And he was with this other guy who was a PR guy or something, and they had this huge bottle of champagne in my car. We went over to the reading, and of course there were a lot of literary types there.
BANA WITT: I didn’t really know who Hunter was until Artie started hanging around with him. I hadn’t read Fear and Loathing.
Artie said, “Oh, Hunter Thompson’s down here, and I want him to meet the world’s greatest poet, so you know, come on down.”
So I get there, and of course there’s just, like, plates of cocaine, so I did about ten lines. Well, I’m not so communicative on coke; when I do that much I stutter, and it’s hard to talk. And Artie’s like, “Recite some of your poetry for him.”
ALEX CASTRO: Needless to say, they were kind of shocked when Hunter brought out all these dancers from the Mitchell brothers’ theater onto the stage, and they started doing their thing—you know, seriously getting down.
Were the girls getting naked? They were getting more than that….
BANA WITT: So I did a poem, and Hunter says, “Well, I wish I could write poems that good; I can’t write poetry at all.”
Artie’s like, “Well, do another one,” and so I did another one, but it just felt so weird.
ALEX CASTRO: Anyway, after the reading—or whatever it was—they went around North Beach, and as the night went on, they got pretty heated. And eventually the public relations gentleman said, “Let’s call it a night.”
Hunter didn’t seem to like that very much. He ended up punching this guy out.
BANA WITT: I wasn’t attracted to Hunter at all. He was so speedy, I couldn’t imagine sleeping with him. The guy is just so wired, you can’t even imagine him being horizontal—let alone relaxed and affectionate.
JACK BOULWARE: The Mitchell brothers were still very much prevalent in the San Francisco scene in the early 1990s, and they went out of their way to support younger artists and publishers. If somebody had a political cause and needed a space to throw a benefit, they would open up their theater. They weren’t making films so much anymore, but they were definitely around.
MARILYN CHAMBERS: Artie got out of hand. As the years went by, the alcohol and the drugs consumed him. He would get really mean and angry, and Jim really had to take over the operation. A couple of times, Artie was not allowed in the theater. I think they came to a point where they were about to break up. Jim just didn’t want to have anything to do with Artie because Artie was just impossible.
Eventually Artie’s whole family—including his mom—begged Jim to help him; they wanted to get him to rehab. Artie would have none of it.
BANA WITT: Artie was very sadistic, but he had a totally gentle, sweet side. But when he was drunk he could be very emotionally cruel. So in the early years he played at keeping me strung out—which kept the sex just fabulous because I never saw him more than one night in a row and usually never more than five or six times a year, you know?
Over seventeen years, sometimes it was just two or three times a year, sometimes as much as a couple times a month; by the very end, it was several times a week.
TOM BYRON: The last time I ever saw Jim and Artie together was at an AVN Awards Show. I was cohosting, and I sang the opening number, “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” Had my fucking Bon Jovi look on. I’m backstage, waiting to do my presenting thing, and Jim and Artie were presenting an award, and Artie was fucked up out of his fucking mind. Jim’s going, “And the nominees are…And the winner is…”
Artie grabs the fucking envelope, rips it up, and says, “GUESS, MOTHERFUCKERS!”
Someone had to whisper to Jim and tell him the winner. It was really embarrassing.
BOB CALLAHAN (WRITER/JOURNALIST): One night I was out with Jim and Artie at a little party we had for a local boxer and a bunch of boxing writers. Artie was drunk and making an ass of himself, trying to pick a fight with this boxer.
Jim never showed his emotions much, but I could see he was heartbroken. He just looked at me and said, “God, it drives me nuts to see my brother like that. I built an empire with this guy, and now he’s like a Telegraph Avenue street babbler. He doesn’t even know how fucked up he is. He’s got to get into a hospital.”
TOM BYRON: Later, while the show was still going on, Artie came backstage and said, “Hey, Tom, c’mere. See that girl over there? That’s my daughter, man. She really wants to fuck you.”
I went, “Uhhhhhh, no, man, I’m already committed tonight. I already got something going on, you know?”
He goes, “Are you sure? ’Cause you could, man. She thought you were hot up there singing, man. Sh-sh-she really wants to fuck you.”
I said, “Artie, man, how you doing? You doing all right?”
Artie goes, “Oh, yeah! Yeah! You wanna tootsie? Tootsie? Tootsie? You want zoozkie?”
I went, “No, man. I gotta go back onstage.” That was the last time I saw him alive.
JACK BOULWARE: I threw a publishing party at a bar in San Francisco, and Jim Mitchell showed up with his girlfriend. He was a really nice guy. I bought him a drink, and we talked about smuggling Cuban cigars. That was really the first time I had ever chatted with him at any length.
Jim was very supportive. He was buying ads in a publication I was editing. He was just very enthusiastic and excited that people were still raising hell in San Francisco. Jim and Artie Mitchell were publishing a small anti–Gulf War newspaper called The War News and a bunch of sixties radicals were contributing to it.
TOM BYRON: Later on, I was looking for a fucking cigarette, and Jim handed me a Marlboro.
I said, “Thanks, man.” I looked down; then I said, “Hey, Jim, how you doing?”
He goes, “Oh, good.” Then he says, “Fuckin’ Artie. That fuckin’ Artie, man.”
I said, “Yeah, all right, see ya later, Jim.”
Those were the last words I ever heard from Jim Mitchell—“Fucking Artie!” Two months later Jim shot him.
MARILYN CHAMBERS: I think Jim went over there that night to
scare Artie, but I think Art surprised him when he came down the hall. And Jim just started shooting. And the bullet ricocheted and went through his eye—and Artie was dead.
JACK BOULWARE: Two weeks later, I opened the newspaper and saw that Jim had killed his brother.
I was shocked. The whole city was shocked. They were such a part of the fabric of the city. I think people who lived here thought they’d always be around because they contributed so much local color to the city. They were fun-loving guys, you know? They weren’t moody or weird or creepy porn people.
They were fun-loving porn people.
TOM BYRON: Oh, dude, man. Joey Silvera called me up and said, “Hey, hear the news, man? Artie got shot. I guess Jim did it.”
I went, “What? Oh, fuck!”
Then I was like, “Oh, well. What are you gonna do?”
JACK BOULWARE: Tensions were clearly increasing between the two brothers. I don’t know why. Does anybody really know why? Only Jim Mitchell knows why he would leave his office with a loaded .22, drive across the bay to his brother’s house—which is dark, no lights on—bang on the door and start shooting.
Jim kills his brother and then walks away—he was trying to stick the rifle down his leg when the police caught him. I mean, that’s what some people call “Okie Justice.”
ROGER YOUNG: I wasn’t too surprised when Jim shot Artie because I kind of followed their lifestyle and what they were doing. Again, I wish we’d gotten more involved. Because one of the Mitchells threw a birthday party for his daughter—Artie had them all in this spa together—and was accused of fondling one of the other girls. They were all underage—eleven or twelve. I was aware that there was something going on.